King Tuts Tomb, Opened

On February 16, 1923, the door to King Tut’s tomb was unsealed. Howard Carter found the tomb in Luxor, Egypt, in November 1922.[1]

According to first-hand accounts in the New York Times, it took hours of work in the sweltering heat to get the door of the tomb to open. Before it was open, Carter made a small hole in the door and used a candle to see what he described as a “Golden Wall.” He was actually seeing “an immense guilt shrine built to cover and protect” King Tut’s sarcophagus. Carter later said that King Tut’s Mommy was in “a spacious and beautifully decorated chamber completely occupied by an immense shine covered with gold.”

One of the most important things found inside the tomb was a stone sarcophagus containing three coffins nestled inside each other. The last coffin was made of solid gold and held the mummified body of King Tutankhamun, who had died at eighteen or nineteen years old in 1334 B.C.[2]